Blueprint

The APC team’s picks for a part-by-part perfect PC build to suit your budget.

Budget

It’s been a long time since we’ve changed anything dramatic in our budget build, and for good reason: There’s nothing right now that would shake up its performance. Everything seems to be situated at the high end. Even Nvidia’s RTX 2060 is still waiting in the docks for some meaningful competition, trying to eke out that last cent for folks committed to buying the latest-gen GPUs. That said, we’ve had a bit of a shuffle around, saved some cash, and managed to splurge on a slightly better GPU: the GTX 1050 Ti. It’s not frame-breaker, but it’s a darn sight better than the 1050. We’re talking a 20 percent improvement on the base hardware alone. Unfortunately, it’s not the 80 percent you’d get for going to the 1060 3GB model, but still an improvement nonetheless.

Mid-range

We desperately wanted to trade out that 1070 Ti for a 1080, but the price difference is nearly double that of the MSI card we are using. “Frustrating” doesn’t quite capture the feeling. “Confusing” might be a better word. In our testing, we’ve found that the 1070 Ti is only around three to five frames per second slower than the 1080. All in all, though, this issue saw no change. Next on the upgrade agenda would be a betterspecced motherboard, potentially the Asus Prime X470-Pro. Because it comes in at $289 right now, that’s a $80 increase, which would still keep us below our $2,500 budget, but also provide some seriously improved connectivity.

“Annoyingly, despite the fact we suspect Nvidia and AIBs have excessive levels of GTX 1080 Ti stock, the prices for the cards are sky-high compared to the RTX 2080. ”

Turbo

Again, no changes in our Turbo build. Annoyingly, despite the fact we suspect Nvidia and AIBs have excessive levels of GTX 1080 Ti stock, the prices for the cards are sky-high compared to the RTX 2080 right now. Given the two cards are the same, it seems Nvidia is attempting to push the market into its ray-traced field, likely to bolster the attractiveness of its ray-tracing gameworks features to developers, and in turn get more sales of the RTX 2080 Ti, its true money-maker. All speculation, but it seems likely.

Outside of our GPU woes, everything else remains the same. You could save some serious cash by dropping out the 2950X for a 2920X. You’d lose out on four cores, but in game, at least, you’d still be packing some seriously impressive frame rates, and 12 cores aren’t to be sniffed at – that’s still 24 threads.

We’re finally starting to see some serious price drops in the memory department. Good quality kits are falling by $20–$30 at a time, and it’s looking good for the foreseeable future, with China threatening class action lawsuits against price fixing. Aside from that, we’ve kept it all fairly standard. We have heard of our favorite CPU cooler having some faulty review units, so we’d keep an eye on that (perhaps opt for a Corsair or NZXT variant instead, if you are worried), but otherwise we’re happy with where this build’s at.